17 dic. 2009

I've been trying to figure out why I like Haydn's String Quartets so much, since I was never that big on the classical style. I tended always to go baroque or modern, and preferred Beethoven to Mozart or Haydn. Now Haydn is imposing himself on me in a big way, and the quartets specifically. I haven't even heard them all, but I have a passing acquaintance now with opus 20, 54, 64, 74, 76. (The numbering is confusing, because there are about several systems for this, so I'm just going with the op. #. Each opus has 3-6 quartets, each of four movements, usually an allegro, an adagio, a minuet, and a fast finale, though sometimes the minuet and adagio are reversed.) I guess the best way to account for this would be to go for the most obvious elements first and work my way toward the mystery.

Melody: the music is tuneful and immediately pleasing. That would be good even if there were nothing else. I have his melodies in my head all the time.

Structure: the structures are fairly easy to follow within each movement. You don't need a huge amount of sophistication and you don't get lost. A high degree of intelligibility. You get the feeling that it is accessible to very modest musical intelligences, like my own, but still probably satisfying for greater ones.

Where I find the appeal is in the combination of a kind of quirky unpredictability with seemingly facile and even formulaic structures and cadences. He is never afraid just to go up and down an arpeggio if that is what is called for. He is inventive in the interplay between instruments; it is as though he were writing a textbook on different ways you might write a quartet. Each movement of each work is unique: there is no sense that he could ever run out of musical ideas. Almost every possible mood is there. There is turmoil and spritely wit, bomastic pride, tenderness and even mild anger. I guess it's a cliché to say he doesn't do tragedy, but I don't really miss it.

Páginas

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."